Small Mercies

She puts on gloves before she reaches the main door. Once she’s inside, she notices the hallway smells a bit different from the ones at Commonwealth. Still smells of Lysol, spilled beer, and the potatoes, cabbage, and corned beef boiled inside at least a quarter of the units every Sunday. But there’s something else, a hint of mold, maybe? The scent of a damp April sidewalk or a nearby swimming pool, but there aren’t any swimming pools around here, that’s for sure. Four doors down on the left is number 209. She knocks and waits, her ear against the door. She hears nothing. She knocks a second time to be sure. She’s got the lock punch tucked under her shirt against her spine, just in case, but Dukie’s pick goes through the lock as if it’s a key. It takes less than thirty seconds, and she’s in.

The unit smells of pot smoke, cigarette smoke, and poor hygiene. In the back room, she finds a flop bed with no sheets and a single pillow, dark with old sweat. In the living room, there’s a torn couch, several plastic beach chairs, and a black-and-white TV sitting on top of a stack of five Yellow Pages, four of them still wrapped in plastic. The bathroom looks like it’s never been cleaned; it’s possible the whiff of mold she got in the hallway stems entirely from this one bathroom, because the wall behind the sink is black, and woolly gray mold-fingers sprout up the tile from the edge of the tub.

She checks the toilet tank, but there’s nothing stashed in there. Checks under the sink, the same. Bedroom yields nothing and neither does the kitchen sink. But on the fifth try — using a broomstick on the drop ceiling in the hallway closet — Ziploc bags plop to the top shelf or plummet all the way to the floor. She finds a chair and steps up to get her hand all the way in there and scoop the other bags out. Once that’s done, she feels something else back there, just the edge of it, something hard. She extends her body and then her fingers, and she knows it’s a gun the moment she wraps her fingers around the grip. She pulls it out — a .38 Smith & Wesson snub nose with a heavily nicked grip that’s beginning to shed rubber. She steps down off the chair and opens the cylinder. It opens easily, so at least the gun’s oiled and maybe even properly cared for. Six bullets nest inside.

She climbs back up, reaches in there a final time, and comes back with a small cardboard box that rattles. She opens it to find another half a dozen bullets inside.

She places all the bags on the kitchenette table, a greasy Formica top with more chips in it than her own. The extra-large Ziplocs contain weed, some of it green and pungent, some of it less green and crumbly, littered with stems; the large Ziplocs contain brown powder she recognizes immediately, with a pang in her heart, or white powder she assumes is cocaine. She knows a bag of black beauties as such right off (Dukie loved his amphetamines) and presumes the other pills are, respectively, ludes, LSD, and mescaline. It’s not a lot of drugs, not for a dealer; if she had to guess, she’d say they’ve sold maybe two thirds of their latest stash by this point. Losing it isn’t going to hurt them in the long run, but it will hurt them tomorrow.

She takes it all.

And the gun.

A few hours later, one of the runners shows up, lets himself in, and then comes back out with a desperate look on his face and tears off out of there.

Fifteen minutes later, both Quentin and Joe-Dog show up in Quentin’s Datsun Z. They run inside. They’re in there a while longer than the runner was. When they come back out, they look exhausted. And scared. They sit on the hood of Quentin’s car and smoke cigarettes and don’t say a word.

About half an hour later — What took you so long, George? — George Dunbar pulls up. George drives a beige late-’60s Impala. An absolutely forgettable car. George is clearly the only member of his crew with some idea of the benefits of escaping notice if you get up to criminal shit on a regular basis. George and his two dealers get into some finger-pointing — George at Quentin and Joe-Dog; Quentin and Joe-Dog at each other.

George storms inside. The other two follow.

Mary Pat starts Bess while they’re in there. Once Bess is idling, she’ll be all right, but when her engine first kicks over, it’s not pretty. The exhaust coughs out puffs of smoke that rise in the rearview, and the motor clears its throat half a dozen times before it calms down. When they come out this next time, she’s pretty sure, they’ll be on the move. It’s best to have Bess primed to move too.

She hears the door swing back against the building when they exit. They stop at the Datsun, where George unleashes a final tongue-lashing, followed by a strident finger pointed first at Quentin and then at Joe-Dog.